This invention relates to wireless communications and more specifically to providing information concerning wireless coverage areas for geographically specific locations.
Wireless communication devices, e.g. cellular handsets, personal digital assistants (PDA) with wireless capabilities, laptop computers enabled for wireless RF communications, etc., are now part of the culture of a substantial percentage of people in the United States. Different service providers are responsible for providing the infrastructure equipment and systems for supporting such wireless communications. While many, if not all, of the service providers provide wireless service for the largest cities and corresponding metropolitan areas, wireless coverage is still not ubiquitous. Even within such a metropolitan area, “shadow areas” exist in which wireless service from a particular wireless carrier is intermittently available or not available at all. Such shadow areas may result from objects between the closest cellular base station and the user's handset that interfere with the RF signal propagation. Alternatively, an area where communications is not supported may simply represent a location with too low a signal strength due to the user's handset going beyond the communication range of the cellular base station.
Wireless coverage becomes even less certain as a subscriber travels outside major metropolitan areas and away from major roadways, e.g. interstate highway system, in the United States. This is a result of the economics of providing wireless infrastructure systems. In more rural areas without a substantial concentration of subscribers or potential subscribers, it is economically unattractive to cellular service providers to build and maintain a sufficient number of cellular base stations to maintain substantially uninterrupted service areas. In an attempt to maximize possible coverage, most service providers have agreements with competing service providers to permit their customers to obtain service through the competing service provider network if it is viable in such rural areas. Such service provision is referred to as “inter-carrier roaming” and normally carries higher service fees than when the subscriber obtains service through the subscriber's primary network. Roaming requires the subscriber's handset to be compatible with the signaling format/protocol used by the roaming system, and this compatibility does not always exist. And even with the possibility of roaming, not all areas are served.
Many cellular service providers and Wi-Fi carriers provide information concerning service coverage areas. However, the specificity of this information is normally not sufficiently granular to allow subscribers or potential subscribers to accurately predict whether specific locations of importance to them, e.g. a house, hotel, work location, waypoint, etc., are adequately served within the coverage area. For example, a cellular service provider may list or show a rural town as being within the service area. From the cellular service provider's perspective, achieving a relatively high percentage of coverage, but less than 100%, of the rural town may constitute service coverage. However, if a specific location of interest to the subscriber or potential subscriber is within the stated “service area”, but the specific location is not actually served or only marginally served, then the information provided by the service provider is inadequate to provide a level of information needed by the subscriber and may in fact mislead the subscriber. Therefore, a need exists for wireless coverage information for specific geographic locations.